Textbooks in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Textbooks in Israel and Palestine have emerged as an issue within the larger Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Textbooks in Israel have been found to contain narratives that dehumanize Palestinian Arabs, or provide justification for or skip over historical topics related to Israeli occupation of Palestine, such as war crimes like the Deir Yassin massacre.
Studies on Palestinian textbooks have highlighted hateful imagery and content. In response to such findings, from 2019 to 2023 the European Parliament passed four resolutions denouncing the Palestinian Authority for the content of its textbooks and stipulating that any future financing for education be conditioned on improvements.
Israel has used the topic of Palestinian textbooks as a Hasbara tool against the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians say that their textbooks rightly focus on their own national narrative, which includes the privations of life under occupation.
Council for Religious Institutions in the Holy Land study
A comprehensive three-year study of Israeli and Palestinian textbooks, regarded by its researchers as "the most definitive and balanced study to date on the topic," found that incitement, demonization or negative depictions of the other in children's education was "extremely rare" in both Israeli and Palestinian school texts, with only 6 instances discovered in over 9,964 pages of Palestinian textbooks, none of which consisted of "general dehumanising characterisations of personal traits of Jews or Israelis". Israeli officials rejected the study as biased, while Palestinian Authority officials claimed it vindicated their view that their textbooks are as fair and balanced as Israel's.The study, published in 2013 by the Council for Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, an interfaith association of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, produced different results. The study was supervised by a psychiatrist, Prof. emeritus Bruce Wexler of Yale University and his NGO, A Different Future, and a joint Palestinian-Israeli research team, headed by Professors Daniel Bar-Tal and Sami Adwan, was commissioned. Six Israeli and four Palestinian bilingual research assistants were employed to analyze the texts of 370 Israeli and 102 Palestinian books from grades 1 to 12. The study found that, while most schoolbooks on either side were factually accurate, both Israel and the Palestinians failed to adequately and positively represent each other, and presented "exclusive unilateral national narratives". It was found that 40 percent of Israeli and 15 percent of Palestinian textbooks were judged to contain neutral depictions of the other, whereas negative characterizations were discerned in 26 percent of Israeli state school books and 50 percent of the Palestinian ones. Israeli schoolbooks were deemed superior to Palestinian ones with regard to preparing children for peace, but the study praised both Israel and the Palestinian Authority for producing textbooks almost completely unblemished by "dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations of the other".
Textbooks in Israel
Assessments of Hebrew textbooks
In his 2004 article "The Arab Image in Hebrew School Textbooks", Dan Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University studied 124 textbooks used in Israeli schools. He concluded that generations of Israeli Jews have been taught a negative and often delegitimizing view of Arabs. He claims Arabs are portrayed in these textbooks as primitive, inferior in comparison to Jews, violent, untrustworthy, fanatic, treacherous and aggressive. While history books in the elementary schools hardly mentioned Arabs, the high school textbooks that covered the Arab–Jewish conflict stereotyped Arabs negatively, as intransigent and uncompromising.Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, an account of her study of the contents of Israeli school books. She asserts that the books promote racism against and negative images of Arabs, and that they prepare young Israelis for their compulsory military service. After examining "hundreds and hundreds" of books, Peled-Elhanan claims she did not find one photograph that depicted an Arab as a "normal person". She has stated that the most important finding in the books she studied concerns the historical narrative of events in 1948, the year in which Israel fought a war to establish itself as an independent state. She claims that the killing of Palestinians is depicted as something that was necessary for the survival of the nascent Jewish state. "It's not that the massacres are denied, they are represented in Israeli school books as something that in the long run was good for the Jewish state." "he Israeli version of events are stated as objective facts, while the Palestinian-Arab versions are stated as possibility, realized in openings such as 'According to the Arab version'... 'Deir Yassin became a myth in the Palestinian narrative... a horrifying negative image of the Jewish conqueror in the eyes of Israel's Arabs'.
With reference to previous studies of Israeli school textbooks, Peled-Elhanan states that, despite some signs of improvement in the 1990s, the more recent books do not ignore, but justify, issues such as the Nakba. For example, in all the books mentioning Deir Yassin, the massacre is justified because: "the slaughter of friendly Palestinians brought about the flight of other Palestinians which enabled the establishment of a coherent Jewish state."
She also states that contrary to the hope of previous studies "for 'the appearance of a new narrative in history textbooks'... some of the most recent school books regress to the 'first generation' accounts — when archival information was less accessible — and are, like them 'replete with bias, prejudice, errors, misrepresentations'".
In 2013, it was reported that Israeli science textbook publishers had been instructed to remove details of "human reproduction, pregnancy prevention and sexually transmitted diseases from science textbooks used in state religious junior high schools as well as from their teacher manuals".
Assessments of Arabic textbooks
According to a 2011 report by the Arab Cultural Association, Arabic textbooks provided to third grade to ninth grade students in Israeli schools contained at least 16,255 mistakes. The report was based on a study and examination of textbooks in all subjects by a committee, headed by Dr. Elias Atallah. Association director Dr. Rawda Atallah said the findings were not surprising, since they were similar to the findings of a previous study published in November 2009, which reported that more than 4,000 mistakes in language and syntax were found in textbooks for second grade students in Arab schools. Researchers also spoke about the way in which Arab students' cultural and national identities are covered. For example, while textbooks state that Jews and non-Jews live in the Galilee, the word "Arab" is never mentioned. Dr. George Mansour, who examined the history textbooks, reported that they ignored the presence of the Arab-Palestinian people in Israel and stressed the Promised Land of the Jewish people: "There is a process of de-Palestinization, instilling of the Zionist narrative and minimizing of Arab culture," reported Dr. Mansour.Teaching the Arab–Israeli conflict
In general, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is hardly mentioned by Israeli textbooks or by high school matriculation examinations, according to a study by Professor Avner Ben-Amos of Tel Aviv University. The lives and perspectives of Palestinians are rarely mentioned, an approach he terms "interpretive denial." In most Israeli textbooks, "the Jewish control and the Palestinians' inferior status appear as a natural, self-evident situation that one doesn't have to think about."According to the Ben-Amos study, one of the main civics textbooks used in Israeli high schools fails to address at all the limited rights of the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation. The more general issue of the occupation was addressed in a previous edition of this textbook but the Israeli debate regarding the occupation was shrunk to a few sentences in the most recent edition under right-wing education ministers. Another Israeli civics textbook completely omits discussion of the dispute over the occupied territories. In civics high school matriculation tests over the past 20 years, no question appeared on the limiting of the Palestinians' rights. The geography matriculation exams ignore the Green Line and the Palestinians.
Nakba terminology
Israel has ordered the word Nakba, meaning disaster or catastrophe and which refers to the foundation of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent forced flight of the Palestinians from Israel-captured land, to be removed from Israeli Arab textbooks. The term was introduced in books for use in Arab schools in 2007 when the Education Ministry was run by Yuli Tamir of the Labor party. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the ban by saying that the term was "propaganda against Israel."The book "Nationalism: Building a State in the Middle East," published by the Zalman Shazar Center, was approved for 11th and 12th classrooms by Israel's Ministry of Education and distributed to shops throughout the country for use in high schools. However, the Minister of Education instructed that the contents of the book be reexamined. The Ministry of Education took the unusual step of removing the book from the shelves and then redacted it. Among other changes, term "ethnic cleansing" in relation to the Nakba was removed and now refers instead to an organized policy of expulsion by the pre-state Jewish militia.
In the past decade, there has been a significant shift within the Israeli education system regarding the representation of the Nakba. The concept has become increasingly present in textbooks and official educational materials across Jewish education systems. At the same time, as the Nakba gains more prominence in the Israeli education system, the differences between state secular and state religious education have become more pronounced. While the secular education system presents a more nuanced and complex perspective on the Nakba, the religious state education system continues to maintain views that unambiguously justify it.